I've got to call.
If he could catch up on his work today, he'd have quite a bit of free time tomorrow, November 27th. It wouldn't be too much trouble to go down to Yokosuka if he was asked to.
He decided it would be better to call from a pay phone than from the office, so he walked to the edge of the sidewalk and took out a telephone card and the man's business card. He punched the number for the Yokosuka Branch Office of the Daily News. Kenzo Yoshino himself answered.
Their last conversation had been pretty one-sided, with Yoshino asking all the questions. He'd seemed to be in a hurry, and had given only the most rudimentary replies to Toyama's inquiries. As soon as he'd learned what he wanted to know, or realized that he could get no further information from Toyama, Yoshino had cut their meeting short, getting up and walking out. It had left Toyama with a myriad of questions, and the feeling that Yoshino's be-havior had been inconsiderate, to say the least.
Why was a reporter sniffing around after Sadako anyway?
That was the most obvious question, and now it was whirling around in his head. Toyama briefly explained to Yoshino what he wanted to know and asked, politely, if they could get together and talk.
He added that if he needed to he'd be willing to go down to Yokosuka, but Yoshino said that wouldn't be necessary, and he explained his schedule for tomorrow.
A colleague from the Daily News had died the day before in a Shinagawa hospital, and Yoshino was planning to go up to Shinagawa for the funeral. He said he could meet him for an hour or so after the funeral.
Let's meet at four o'clock at Shinbaba Station on the Keihin Express line, at the ticket gate.
Toyama repeated the time and place, wrote them in his schedule book, and hung up.
3
The sun was quick in setting today. Toward late afternoon the sky darkened as if shrouded in mist and the sun sank with violent rapidity. The air grew markedly chill, and it felt like winter as he stood by the ticket gate, which opened into a shopping street.
Toyama and Yoshino were both there five minutes early.
Yoshino looked more careworn and forlorn than he had a month before. Of course, he'd just come from a junior colleague's funeral—that probably had something to do with it. When someone younger dies, it's always depressing.
Toyama had never gotten out at this station before.
He knew that if he walked east he'd eventually run into a canal, and before that he'd hit the Shore Road, running north and south. On the water side of that was a quiet warehouse district, where overhead one could hear the horns of shipping in Tokyo Bay.
Toyama and Yoshino walked together to a coffee shop just this side of the Shore Road. They went inside and ordered coffee, but before they'd had time to exchange more than a few words, Yoshino's pager went off.
He left the table and went to the pink pay phone in the back of the shop. Toyama watched him from behind.
Yoshino looked every inch the reporter as he cradled the receiver on his shoulder and dialed.
Toyama had no difficulty overhearing Yoshino's end of the conversation.
"What? Mai Takano's been found dead?"
Mai Takano... Of course Toyama had never heard the name before. All he was interested in was what happened to Sadako. He couldn't muster any interest in this woman whose name he didn't recognize. He tried to ignore the rest of the conversation.
Yoshino made no effort to muffle his voice as he bent over the receiver and barked out questions. The somewhat sad expression of a moment before was gone now, and Yoshino was once again the reporter sniffing out a story. He looked reenergized.
"Three days ago... Where? ...East Shinagawa—wait a minute, that's not far from where I am now. I could swing by if I have time... Which was it? You know, was it a forensic autopsy or an administrative one? I see...
Hmm, ninety hours after time of death.... Huh? Signs that she gave birth just prior to death? ...the umbilical cord? Are you kidding me? And what about the baby?
...Gone? You mean...hide nor hair?"
It was enough for Toyama to piece together the situation. Three days ago a woman named Mai Takano had been found dead in this vicinity. An autopsy had been performed, revealing that she'd given birth immediately before her death. And the child was now missing.
A shocking incident, to be sure. But after all, it had nothing to do with him. It didn't matter to him who had died and how, or what she'd given birth to—or even if that newborn baby had, totally under its own power (strange though that would be), disappeared...
Toyama thought—was determined to think—that the incident had no connection with him, and yet his nerves were tingling.
Mai Takano.
He'd never heard the name before. So why did he now feel like it was engraved somewhere deep in his heart?
He found himself imagining her body, already enter-ing rigor mortis, with something squirming beside it.
Imagining an infant climbing over its mother's corpse and walking away.
A chill came over him. He had a powerful intuition regarding what Mai Takano had given birth to, and it wouldn't let him tell himself anymore that he wasn't interested. As he watched Yoshino hunched over the phone and listened to the unguarded fragments of his conversation, the facts, or pieces of them, began to form definite images in his brain and play themselves out. It was like when he took segments of music and edited them together into a single, smoothly flowing track.
Toyama closed his eyes and turned his face to the ceiling. The voice at the phone stopped and there was a moment of silence. When he opened his eyes again, Yoshino was seated opposite him—when had he returned?
The last few minutes, the duration of the phone call, felt distorted to Toyama—forcefully so, like he'd been twisted up and tossed abruptly into another dimension.
"Is there something wrong?" Yoshino sounded concerned by the look of enervated astonishment on Toyama's face.
Toyama straightened up in his seat—he'd sunk into a slouch—and took a deep breath before saying, "No...
But it sounds like you've got quite a sensational incident on your hands."
"I don't know about that yet. A young female was found dead on a rooftop, is all."
"Nearby?"
"Yeah, East Shinagawa. An office building. She was found in the exhaust shaft on the roof—a hole, basically.
Odd, right?"
"Was it murder?"
"It doesn't sound like it. Probably an accident."
"I didn't mean to eavesdrop, but, um, I heard you say that there were signs she'd given birth just before dying."
Yoshino gave Toyama an indecipherable grin and a questioning glance. Why are you so interested in this!
"Well, I don't know anything yet—I just heard the report. A pity it had to happen to someone so young, though. She was a smart girl. Pretty, too."
Yoshino looked away and stroked his beard. There seemed to be something more bothering him. Toyama had a hunch.
"This Mai Takano—she didn't happen to be an acquaintance of yours?"
Yoshino immediately shook his head. "No, I didn't know her personally. But a colleague of mine did, Asakawa. It was his funeral I was at: we were pretty close. He knew her."
A look of anxiety crossed Yoshino's face, and Toyama observed it. Anxiety—but more than that, dread.